Ellese Carmona, a graduating senior from San Diego State. Carmona went to Chula Vista High School prior to SDSU and now will be going to Harvard in the fal

San Diego State University has sharply boosted its minority graduation rate and narrowed the achievement gap between minority students and others, earning recognition from a national advocacy group.

As the university prepares to award nearly 10,000 degrees over the weekend, a new report by the Education Trust highlights SDSU as one of the most successful campuses among 22 public higher education systems participating in an initiative to close the graduation gap between underrepresented minority students and the rest of the student population.

SDSU had reduced the gap from 19 percent to 8 percent from 2005 to 2010, while raising graduation rates for both groups.

In 2005, 37 percent of underrepresented minorities graduated within six years of entering SDSU as freshmen, while that rate was 56 percent for nonminority students. By 2010, the graduation rate for minorities had risen to 59 percent and 67 percent for the rest of the population.

The goal of the Access to Success program is to cut the gap in the graduation rate between underrepresented minorities and the rest of the student body by 50 percent by 2016. Underrepresented minorities are defined as African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders.

SDSU, where officials say they were focused on closing the achievement gap well before the Access to Success initiative began in the fall of 2007, is one of three schools held out as examples in the initiative’s midterm report.

Jennifer Engle, director of higher education and policy for the Education Trust, said SDSU’s progress is significant on a couple of fronts.

“That’s why we highlighted San Diego State,” she said. “They were not only increasing graduation rates for low-income and minority students, they were also narrowing the gap between those students and others.”

All the while, the population of underrepresented minorities in the student body steadily increased from 26 percent in 2005-06 to 43 percent in 2009-10.

As a whole, the 22 public systems — with 312 campuses serving 3.5 million students — saw their nonminority graduation rates rise from 58 percent in 2005 to 61 percent in 2010. The rate for underrepresented minorities rose from 43 percent to 45 percent, but since it didn’t rise as much as the nonminority rate, the achievement gap widened from 15 percent to 16 percent.

Within the 23-campus California State University system, the graduation rate for underrepresented minorities has risen from 38 percent to 46 percent over the life of the initiative, but the achievement gap was reduced only from 15 percent to 14 percent.

“The CSU was working on this before the initiative came along,” said Ken O’Donnell, an official at the system’s Long Beach headquarters. “But this gives it a higher profile, more focus … The work (SDSU) has done on this is really amazing, stellar.”

The other two campuses broken out for case studies by the Education Trust were the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Florida State University.

“They all had success with raising rates and lowering the gap,” Engle said. “These were schools that rose to the top because we saw a strong trajectory in the data. That suggested this was important to them. We wanted to learn more about how they were able to sustain their progress over time.”